More Virtuous Reality

I do remember as a young boy some friends who had some money and whose parents were more indulgent than mine had one of those itty bitty Sony TVs back when they first came out. Cute was the word which came to mind, that quality of animal life which must make young offspring easier to care for.

Actually the TV belonged to the MD Dad, who might actually have indulged himself more than he did the kids. It might have been a way to watch football without hogging the family resources, this when the VW beetle was new on the scene; markets were breaking across borders, and all of us were enthralled by mini.

I'm certain I was pre-pubescent, so my wanting of that cute little B&W TV was chaste in its way. More in the manner of wanting a stuffed animal than a racy automobile. Though I also remember fantasizing about how to get one. It might have been realistic to scrimp and save from the paper route and buy a small portable for my bedroom, but that would never have passed family muster. We weren't even allowed to watch TV except for certain hours; never after dinner.

I think part of the fascination for this particular little TV was that we might bring it along on canoe trips, which the boys of our families shared. I imagined laying on a sleeping bag in a dark canvas pup tent of the sort you might allow your kids now to erect in the backyard, if you live in a gated community. It may have been brought on one trip once, but either the battery was clumsy, or there was simply no reception up north that far in Canada.

Or my Dad exerted some moral authority about the disturbances which were acceptable in nature.

And now you know I can watch movies on my little iPhone, with a screen of such high definition, and a size and weight and battery life to make that boy I was wither with envy. But no, I imagine now some 3D goggles, and projections up on my field of vision. I would lust for such technology.

I just finished a Netflix film, made only in France, distinguishing virtue from reality - a fine exploration of the danger of lust when it invades the world of polite society. It was daylight behind me, I'm ashamed to say, and the light from the window made an annoying reflection on the tiny screen. My own face would intrude when the scenes were dark. I should have been in a darkened room, watching on a larger screen.

My future goggles will also annoy me when the projection is darker than the actual scene and I make the cardinal mistake to mistake virtue in broad daylight. (someday I would like to drive one of those cars whose instruments are projected onto the field of vision; and would they work so well at night or would you steer into the speed limit?)

Perhaps we do get locked ever more tightly into a world which diminishes, no longer cute, into all the time indoors. Which may also be why there is no Windows © which can secure the fortunes of Microsoft. Hell, even finding that copyright sign, unless you know the Mac-like arcane keystroke, is that much easier on my cellphone.

Because I am supersaturated now with possibilities for my entertainment. Though I don't understand how people cluster on-line. Why would you want to be known as a VW hobbyist by posting your exploits to virtual friends. How long can fascination with wooden boat repair and construction last, when you have to move across the continent for work?

Those who stay put, embedded in the craft of whatever-it-is so rarely now adopt the voice of wisdom online, that I actually do remember back when the Internet was new and generous spirits prevailed.

It is now again the case that you will do better to travel to some shop or seaport and start conversations and eventually find that generous spirit. If he will accept a cup of coffee or lunch he might even indulge your questions. Unless they are trivial enough to be answered while continuing to work, up against the deadline which is having enough to live on.

What is it we presume of one another? Where would I find the leisure, for instance, to try this voice in ways which could be worked into something you might like to read? Could I develop a character? Could I imagine interesting exploits, and explore them for you on the virtual page, and could I make them captivating enough for you to follow?

Perhaps, but I must feed myself and the chase after those wages leaves me just that tired that I am fortunate to take a walk and collapse in sleep, only to face another commute and having only enough time to dress and eat and depart on time if I get up at 5:30 in the freaking morning. Where is the leisure I can take advantage of, with so many options floating now around and about me?

It is simply too much effort even to look, and so I catch a random movie, perhaps on my iPhone, based on some selection process which transcends any sense I could ever make of it.

There are times, in other words, when I don't want to think that hard; when I want to be entertained. No wonder we pay to buy tickets at the movies. Which should make the movies like some sort of performance art. Soon  there will be no more worries about copyright. As with a fine comedian, you won't pay to hear him if the jokes are stale: the recorded version is worthless. Or to put it virtuously, the stale jokes need to be camouflaged with something to make them seem surprising. Is there anything new at the movies?

But for now folks unlike me remain unjaded, and skip lustily among the virtual daisies, certain that there can be some perfect flower among the weeds, and that she can be had for nearly nothing. Roll me another one, over and over and over again.

I cannot. I know that every time I search for the best deal and pay as little as I do to be entertained I'm ripping someone off. It's not the copyright infringement. It's the rights infringement of people whose labor is aggregated for the enrichment of someone with the right social capital to exploit it properly. I will sell your handicrafts for you where the buyers have real money. And you will get fair market value and I will find a way to live among the gringos on the hill.

Now I must return to searching for the cheapest shocks for my old Vee Dub. I guess I am looking to avoid paying money I don't have to. I guess I'm trying to stay away from people who would rip me off.

But wouldn't it be actually nice if each of us held on less tightly to what we have? We would have to want less, maybe, or want different things from those which cost us money. What if we were to want time with friends more, or time in the great out-of-doors. You know, without the gear. The gear always costs something north of a couple of grand  (in dollars), and then you're committed.

I know these things. SCUBA diving, skiing, biking, rock climbing, hell even just hiking and camping there is a price point which gets calibrated against our desire. I won't even talk about sailing, and certainly not in an old wooden sailboat. Mainly because it would make me very very sad.

So you know, unlike all my very clever friends, I didn't actually bargain very hard for my car. I had no particular resentment about the commission the salesperson might be making, and couldn't really justify whatever few hundreds I might save at purchase time against the lifetime of the car.

Sure, I've spent lots of money now across over 300,000 miles, but I never did have to replace the shocks. or even the muffler, not to mention the bigger stuff. I struggle now about putting any more money in, but I think there is no virtue in polluting the world with whatever it takes to build a new one. There must be junkyards full of engines for when this one bites the dust. The car itself, you know, feels solid. I should just bit the bullet and buy the shocks. No, I should have them put in by someone who knows how to do it.

Bite me.

Meanwhile what the hell does it really matter? We can't resolve ourselves to agree about these things. There seems to be no way to get trains built which would squander that much less money individually. We'd call it government waste and lament the cost overruns.

We could read, or watch our Netflix on our iPhones or get work done by finding new ways to take it home in Dropbox © (it was still on my clipboard!), and who really cares about full Windows interoperability anyhow? Isn't what I've got good enough finally?

I know, if you don't, that all this chasing after bargains can be resolved easily enough into chasing after our mechanized replacements, who can do so much so cheaply now and where is all that leisure that we all once were promised? It is not really fun to drive a car when the driving is on a California freeway.

And so we focus on the luxury appointments on the inside. Which afford that same faraway satisfaction upon purchase. Someday, perhaps, a trip along a winding country road, ending up in wine country to spend some time with friends in pretense that it wasn't frantically purloined from the rest of the daily grind?

All of those bits of time now render upward to those who have so much of it they really don't know what to do with it. There are cruises and exotic spots to conjur the way they were without you. It all of it enslaves and ensnares the ones who are stuck.

But we're all stuck. I in my language and culture where I become nothing but an annoyance among Chinese, because the social imbalance destroys my poise with language and I don't know whom to ask or whom to trust, to navigate the border crossings in my mind.

For sure there is no God but Ah Ha!

Well, back to home-work. Or maybe I'll go to the movies. The day is not sunny enough to feel any loss of virtue.

Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers - an allegory of the mind

I was shocked when I watched Hero. It seemed that history had been flip-flopped yet again and so Qin Shihuang was not a despot anymore. I can't remember if Mao used him that way, or if this would be a way to rehabilitate Mao. And then the Olympic ceremonies really really confused me.

Was the director of Hero, this Zhang Yimou, unreservedly contributing to Chinese chauvinism, or was he playing off the panic he would cause in Western audiences, showing hordes of exquisitely choreographed drummers, smiles lately pasted on, but still in imitation of our nightmare yellow hoards?

Finally I did remember which movie I'd wanted to watch before Blockbuster goes out of business for good, and there are no other from virtual shelves to browse (I can't find anything on virtual shelves - it takes all the pseudo-random out). I watched it first without subtitles, just to see how well I would follow. The subtitles added a few things, but not so much, to the illusion of understanding.

This is a martial arts film of sorts. If nothing else, the martial arts are ways to decenter consciousness in the acts we commit for self-preservation or in the name of a cause. The body becomes trained to respond as if with foreknowledge, taking advantage, one has to presume, of the faster neurological response at the preconscious level than the one which follows conscious calculation.

In the mythic realm, these reactions seem like pre-cognition or some awful meshing with the workings of fate. One moves as if by accident to some stimulus which it is not quite conceivable one could have reacted to.

In The House of Flying Daggers, the protagonist seems blind, in imitation of that state where you finally do get your mind out of the way and become one with the flow of the qi. The movie's all about seeming, though, especially where protestations of truth and loyalty are concerned. Saying the wrong thing turns out right, and the love connection goes contrary to the rules you would suppose.

Following on the Beijing Spring of 'six-four,' when so many were injured or killed for their effrontery to the Party, it's almost impossible to view this film as other than allegory. But it's hardly necessary, So many more films have been produced which are that much more direct in their politics.

And even though Zhang Yimou clearly and decisively demonstrates his mastery of classical sensibilities in all of his depictions as well as in his dialog, and thereby establishes that he might . . . no, that he must . . . be deploying ancient and refined arts of indirection; analogs from world of letters to the arts deployed by Gong-fu masters. He invites you to read into his images for some central truth about what really is going on.

Except that the material stands frustratingly on its own. And even of the Olympic show, Stephen Spielberg has this to say:

At the heart of Zhang's Olympic ceremonies was the idea that the conflict of man foretells the desire for inner peace. This theme is one he's explored and perfected in his films, whether they are about the lives of humble peasants or exalted royalty. This year he captured this prevalent theme of harmony and peace, which is the spirit of the Olympic Games. In one evening of visual and emotional splendor, he educated, enlightened, and entertained us all.

Thus turning everything, as he must, into Hollywood twaddle. As if it were all about peace and love and harmony, but I'm sure Zhang would never want to contradict Spielberg.

Anyhow, peace and love have nothing at all to do with Olympic contests. These enact struggles to the death and in that sense are as real as the absurd martial arts sequences in Zhang's films. They also rehearse those things which have kept us and all species alive in the wild. Good reflexes and the ability to construct reality as fast as it happens to us.

If the films could not stand on their own, apart from allegory, they would be unwatchable. No matter whether or how they might pass muster with government censors. In any case, there is no censorship in China that's any different from the kind that we deploy in the West. So long as you are helping to build the economy without taking direct potshots at the Party, there's not much you can't say or do.

And why would anyone want to take direct shots? There's way too much power always on the ready for deployment; Power to keep things moving along they way that they already are.

What does a little freedom of speech really matter when everyone's being so distracted by things which need doing right in front of them.

At least the Chinese movie-goers understand what we don't: that there's no truth to the illusion of truth. And therefore they can move ahead without any illusions about the stakes or about the consequences. While we here in the West can continue to indulge creative fictions that because our misery has been moved offshore, it's not something we have anything to do with.

Which makes us here rather more subject to dictatorial whims than they are there. After all, the Party after Mao and Deng is not controlled from some single man. It resembles more the human brain, which delegates out to nerve centers more near the action what it would do in cases near enough to numbingly normal that they don't need to be dealt with by the self-conscious mind.

Back to that pseudo-randomness I like so much on shelves of books or DVDs arranged for my perusal. Of course eye-level real-estate is the most valuable, and as any grocery-shelf stocker will tell you, there's nothing at all random about the arrangement of items on shelves. This is easy enough to demonstrate to oneself by going back and looking again for that thing you never saw but subsequently remembered the title for.

The trouble with virtual shelves is that you feel too much in control when you don't want to be. Something needs to at least seem to stand still. Otherwise you feel like you're hallucinating reality. You can get kind of desperate looking for things when the shelves all shift and change their sort according to what kinds of keyterms you type in.

* * *

It's fairly unproblematical historically to refer to the Chinese written language as the nervous system for the state. It allowed administration to be centralized for a people spread almost amazingly far away in geographic - and also temporal - space. But it's also easy to suppose that this function could be filled by any written language.

In one sense of course it could be. Orders from the center and feedback from the periphery can be reliably rendered in any kind of written language. But Chinese has afforded a dialect and spoken-language--community independent means for "transmission" by abstracting from the spoken language a differing written form.

That form is not simply like Latin in that it stays relatively stable and has been mastered only by a priesthood. It represents a much more radical economy by incorporating strict and ideological controls on any proliferation of its forms. Well, as with all things, until recently.

What the Chinese written language enables is for any official anywhere along the chain of "transmission" to reliably anticipate what the center would say or will say or is likely to say if and when it gets around to it, or finds the need for it.

This is a powerful difference from any written language elsewhere in time or place. And it means that the overall entity called China can function in a manner more analogous to the human "mind" than can we in the West. Our language remains in thrall to the transmission of information in just the fashion that we remain in thrall to novelty, authenticity and origination of any sort.

Some day shortly I'm certain that there will be an ultimate crystallization of sense in English, say, to where all religionists and Republicans and atheists and freethinkers will all have to agree because of some powerful scientific finding. But, um, I'm not exactly willing to hold my breath in waiting.

Meanwhile, we suffer dictatorial and centralized controls much moreso than do the Chinese for whom all meaning is already known to be allegorical, though without priority as to which is the real meaning and which the allegory. Ironically enough, there is no center in the Middle Kingdom, just as there is no real democracy over here.

Irony abounds!

Just Biutiful!

I strolled by a new book by Oliver Sacks on the way in to see this new-ish Spanish flick, Biutiful. The Mind's Eye, apparently about the ways in which humans can adapt to making sense and socializing despite deficits among the major neurologic systems. I hope I can find the time to read it.

From the cover blurb, I find that you can remain social without the ability to speak, and you can remain observant without sight or even musical without pitch. This is hopeful facing a world now where the very supposition of information sufficiency provides the most significant deficit of all time. We are no longer aware of how it is that we pick and choose what to pay attention to. We actually believe that so long as things reported are true, things are working as they should. Wikileaks will save the world!

But when we hear again about a college shoot-em-up, we never consider how paying attention to that event is at the same time robbing attention from not just other events, but other things we maybe should be thinking about. We can look aghast and not consider for that moment the still more awful things happening all around us.

Biutiful is at least as grim as a Coen brothers' film, and Bardem draws certain of his stark reflection of reality from them in this Spanish take. Among other things, the film puts the lie to the idea that evil actors are the root of evil. These actors' parts are systematically compromised by their situations, and being true to those you love and interact with seems always to involve screwing others who plug in at some different level.

It's not enough to be true to those you love. No matter what, bad things still happen. No matter which diet you choose, or how much you exercise and no matter that drought in the rainforest causes by omission more carbon left in the atmosphere than the U.S. pumps in in a year, there's still global warming and nothing we can resolve ourselves to do about it.

In all things, what we lack is any good integrative method to resolve things like how the human self works beyond its collection of well-understood discrete systems. We lack any political system which can render up sound policy that isn't just a fudge of compromise between and among near violently held opposition.

Our economic beliefs seem to keep people working for so long as there is perpetual growth, which seems to mean for so long as there are people who will always want more and more and more. But then the earth entire presents its limits and so we are forced back from our frontiers.

If the Earth were a body we would be still more distant from understanding its workings than we are those more limited microcosms we pilot around and call by proper names. Systems interact one with another and change themselves in the interaction. Our math fails to keep up. There is no emotional calculus. Yet.

Yet as individuals we need not lash out when the world lets us down. We need not scream our outrage, and kick and scratch at and destroy those who will not love or include us. In this film, Biutiful, the protagonist learns that he will die. He will cross a threshold from which there is no turning back. He is a spiritualist of sorts, who mends the frayed endings for relatives when transitions are sudden and without warning. Uxbal. A name which might call across the ages. An alien with the look of a primordial Spaniard.

The acting in this film is wonderful. Facing death, Uxbal must play to those who might tend to his children whom he will leave behind. He must hold back from selfishness of any sort, even as he must compromise for the sake of his own children and his compromises directly result in the horrific deaths of sweatshop denizens from China. His children's caretaker among them. He'd been trying to sweeten these workers' lives with portable heaters. The shoddy cheap Walmart-style Chinese imports suffocated the workers instead.

Frozen in our own comforts, we watch now, vaguely eager for the success of the newly emboldened citizenry in Egypt. We've already forgotten how the Chinese Party rulers readjusted after Tank Boy. We know it's gauche to disparage our comforts here at home. Global warming, you know, seems so vague, and no-one knows which way to steer things really. I will seek out bargains.

What else is there to do? Like many of the rest of us, I watched the SuperBowl yesterday, thinking that otherwise I might miss out on an important collective experience. I wanted to see the ads, and compare the half-time show to the Olympics in China. I felt vaguely wasted afterward. Cheated.

I strolled around Pasadena before catching the bookstore where I spied Oliver Sacks' new book, before catching the film. I marveled at their success installing or instilling right there on Main Street (Colorado Blvd. actually) the innards of a typical high-end shopping mall. There was even an Apple Store. Restoration Hardware.

It was much more pleasant than a shopping mall though, since there were people from all walks of life, and if you don't like the chain store offerings for lunch, you can stroll along until you came to a more authentic place with local flavor. Well, assuming that there is a "local" in the greater LA sprawl.

Why can't that happen back in Buffalo? At great expense a pedestrian mall was built downtown, but there are no stores. The stores are all out beyond the rotten core, in sprawlsville, and the shoppers all look like the upper track from high school. The realpolitikal landscape utterly prevents any kind of overarching plan which might mitigate against the bottom devouring tendencies of brutal unrestrained capitalism.

What harm if regional planners were able to trump greedy developers? Unless it was the planners who caused the trouble in the first place. The pedestrian mall destroyed as much as it provided an opportunity to come if they would build it.

What if government investments in school were regarded not as expense but as investment? What if it weren't only possible to provide extraordinary funding for those with diagnoses? What if the healthy livers among us were to get the lions share of healthcare dollars and what if it turned out that the really sick would number fewer therefore?

How could this calculus work?

What if you were changed by the reality you interact with as much as it is changed by you? What if you were able to sense those changes ahead of time and what if it were considered to be OK for you to behave as though you did? What if common sense was not always a matter of getting the best price? What then??

It won't buy you forever, but maybe your kids will be better taken care of. Maybe.

Inception

Hello World!

It wasn't all that long ago that I was willing to pay the cost of an economy car to purchase a home-built clone PC. I probably wasn't willing to pay enough to buy the brand-named item, just as I will probably never be interested to spend more than economy car prices for wheels. But it was a chunk of change - over $5K -  to have something without graphics or mouse on which to calculate complicated spreadsheets. Eventually some statistics. Mostly for word-processing.

Think of it! Nowadays, when cars are still more essential than they were even back at the beginnings for PCs, what would it take for you to be willing to spend, say, fifteen thousand dollars, to do something you can already do, but in new ways? Seemingly better ways? How much more of your world is there left to mediate, digitally. Remember the thrill of graphics? Of color? But do you remember that the price had already dropped, and that's what made your desire harden into purchase.

Can you even imagine such a thing? A fifteen thousand dollar digital device? There's very little difference among various flavors of wheels so far as what they're good for, and  yet the price differential can be intense. But less intense, really, than it used to be. There is a standard car price, just as there is a standard PC price, and the spread from luxury to abject suffering is as if from all to nothing. Cars generally work better than they used to and so the only reason to spend more is likely for comfort or luxury. If you can't pay for reliability, buy a used car. But used laptops cost more than the newer cheaper ones. And cars are really digital devices now too. A big giant brain on wheels, is how I think I heard the Ford Focus touted. The most economical car around.

These days if you see someone engaged in extreme physical maneuvers, you will almost certainly see someone nearby with a video cam. What's it called? Parkour? The Guggenheim is soliciting You-tubes for a major show of "the new" and movies have become about what a movie is about. The world has ended and we are driving on fumes. Momentum carries us as though things were still as they ever have been, word without end, amen.

It is my turn now, to get the job I really love. Now, where will I be applying? The only amazing thing about this film, Inception, is that its protagonists, the dream invaders, are still doing someone else's bidding. They have no independent source of income. They have a boss. These dream invasions are done for the purposes of corporate espionage. Victory means staving off world domination. Mac beats PC. Google rules. The movie maker mocks himself mocking his audience; the roobs who will pay to be hyped and think they can think as fast as the film can move.

I watched this one, as I once did the Lord of the Rings, right up close at neckbreaking vantage. It sucked nearly as badly. In a mall full of unselfconscious mallrats and never a one of them with video cams, since why would they need them? There is nothing apart from self-disclosure in the mall.These people all look like they want to be a porn video. Personally. Just for you, my love. Or, safely, can I pay for some private anonymous session across the 'net. You show me yours and I'll show you mine, but only one of us picks up the tab? Weird.

I picked that one up listening to Gary Shteyngart just now. How can he know about these things and I can't? He seems to think he's the last reader on the earth, the last writer, likening himself to some Jap shooter still hiding out in some cave on some Pacific island, not having heard the news that the unthinkable has happened and the sacred emperor has been defeated. No one reads anymore. But I read Absurdistan, and this guy is as far from a writer as you can get and still be published. His text is digitally mediated; all satire, no earnest sense. There is no irony left in the world anymore. No sense of irony, since it's all ironic all the time.

So Inception, the movie, insults its audience almost beyond the point of endurance. It mocks all chase scenes, all shootemups, all secret agent movies, and the only thing I don't get is why the protagonists still have to have employers. I mean if you can dig into people's dreams, shouldn't you be self-employed at the very least? Shouldn't you be the master of the universe instead of minioning for some other master? Or is that how they work out the bad guys' bullets never landing?

But really, the moment of Inception is when you are up against it. When you return from Seattle, say, to Buffalo and you just can't help noticing that the people in the commuter airline ghetto out of JFK have last years' model of laptop, smartphone, clothes, looks on their faces. You can't help but wonder if the genepool has been drained by the cooler places, or is it just a matter like those vanity photoshoots you used to be able to do for your boyfriend, where you get all made up like a whore or like a bride and that's what they do in cooler more moneyed venues. Some combination of both by each?

But really, when you want that kind of beauty then you are a rapist as were these mind-fuckers in the movie as they were doing to you in the audience, and it isn't art or literature or even satire. It's rude and deadly to your soul. Don't watch it. It really really sucks. I don't even know what I'm saying, but I know the message has been implanted. Don't watch it if you value your soul.

The Blind Side

I'm still operating on West Coast time, I guess. I tried to muster the energy last night at least to watch a rented movie, since I certainly had no energy to write. And I have such a backlog of things I want to write about now, it's almost oppressive.

I started watching the Blind Side, the one with that lovely Sandra Bullock who was recently so blind sided herself.

I want to go on record, before I muster the energy to finish it, that I'd like to know how they salvage the dignity of that big black boy. Especially going up against Precious as the movie does. So far, it looks as though he'll owe it all to Sandra, which would not be what I would call dignified for the character of the big black kid.

Walking back from my welcome-home blood draw this morning, the woman walking in front of me was nearly blind sided by a Buffalo cop who'd sped out from his green light to make a left turn right into her sprightly step. She kept patting her chest in mock collapse and real shock.

I guess the cop was watching his on-board computer, having just come away from that massive conclave of police, fire, and rescue vehicles that I'd wanted to kibitz on along my return walk. No evidence by the time I got there, except for the remark of some other passers by that the  hot dog stand seems to be still open. I can only guess that it was the spot in danger.

We always need to worry around here about businesses disappearing for this or that good reason. On the other side of the spectrum, I was a little bit non-plussed to learn that one of my favorite breakfast haunts has now gone the way of all flesh - but in this case, I mean that they removed all the old kitschy comfortable Formica and Naugahyde to trend in the direction of the suburbanite cool-magnet my neighborhood aspires to. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the other trendy spot which suddenly looks closed. Or the seedy bar now looking like it's being transformed into a restaurant.



Then in the barber shop, right there on the front page of the local section of the News was the report of the grand opening of the new Confucius Institute, which I'd witnessed myself, right off the red-eye, curious to see what I was missing.

Down the page was a report of Wolf Blitzer, revisiting the high school from which he'd graduated where many of my friends and relatives attended. I either never knew that factoid, or I'd forgotten it. I think I knew that he was a UB grad.

Further back in the paper was a report of the death, apparently by pulmonary embolism, of a quite young man who was featured since he'd been the famous victim of a child kidnapping case way back when.

Blind sided then and again just now, by the very thing which might have killed yours truly. Which just goes to show you.

Tonight (in a few minutes actually) I'll attend the welcome back to Buffalo party of some really good friends of my parents' generation. I'm not the kind of guy who merits parties of any sort myself, the accomplishment of my Master's Degree being so much beneath expectation for instance, or my return from anywhere since I'm always gone.

I think you have to instigate these things somehow yourself, or have some significant other to do it for you, like I did for my Master's degreed ex wife. I'm not an instigator. I'm not feeling sorry for myself, I'm just saying. Maybe you have to be social to some significant degree, or moneyed. I should have a housewarming for this apartment before I leave it again.

Most of my time out West was spent messing around with cars, and to tell the truth, I'm kind of pleased with myself.  I pasted back together my daughter's old VW yet again. It wasn't much: fabricating a spring for the gas cap cover, finding a guy to weld the muffler, replacing the brakes for peanuts for my little peanut who'd worn them to naught on Seattle's artificially tamed hills. Just enough to keep the rustbucket moving, and by the time I left she (or is it Bob?) was driving really well. (I learned about Seattle's hills as if by magic when, on the way out of town, I discovered this really cool museum but a short walk from where I was staying!)

While out there I learned that the father of my other daughter's first semester roommate shot himself on Easter day. Talk about a blind side. Since the guy was retired from the NYC police force while still really young, you have to think that there was something in him that was really really hard to talk about. Something the rest of his family was blind to.

In the pile of mail I retrieved from the Post Office when I got back yesterday, along with the census notice and the census reminder notice, there was an entire new stack of notices from the various health insurance companies I'm involved with. Mostly new rejection notices, plus a mandatory notice that I might be eligible (NOT!) for a government subsidy in case I left my job involuntarily. I just don't qualify for much of anything these days. It makes me tired in advance to ponder the calls I'll have to make against all the new health insurance denials.

Some day soon, I promise, I'll write up my observations on this country's wonderful health care system, since I've apparently been on assignment to catch out its shortcomings. I feel like one of those test cases against the tax preparation or computer repair industry, where you purposefully hobble the computer, or pose a relatively complex tax question, just to see what the proportion is of  "correct" responses might be. In the case of tax preparation, you could add in the IRS just for comic relief, since they're not able actually to give you tax prep. advice. Just the facts and the information.

I discover that I have no writing style anymore. As if I ever did. Maybe this is a good thing. Nothing is better than something if the something is only in your imagination, right? It's all uphill from here. Or is it down? In any case, it can't get any worse!! I just hope I don't get blind sided by some new discovery of what it is I lack. Or have too much of. Can't wait to see this house right around the corner from me. It's in a really nice neighborhood. It's almost amazing what you can find right around the corner even though nobody ever told you about it.

Oh yeah, and I have this confession to make. I got myself a laptop out west. Like all laptops on the less expensive than Apple side of things, this one came pre-loaded with Windows as its OS. I'd thought that I was sworn off Windows in favor of Linux. But it seems I'm not. There's something nice about having things just work and not having to think about them, and about having all the details thought out and fully engineered. Even though copyright is only created for the Big Guys. I have to pick my battles anymore. And I got sick of the endless updates. I guess I told you that already. Welcome back!

Slumdog jilted

Isn't it ironic? I mean after my previous post, and then after spending much of the day working up arguments against the Obama bashers in the family, who just can't quit. I guess Fox TV just can't quit either. Then this perfected film about the standard projected theme.  Hollywood Bollywood (is that how you spell it?) Schmalliwood. Are they all the same? Are we looking in the mirror here toward our own future, where the slums of Mumbai look so terribly much like the dystopic dreams of our environmentalist avant garde. And the poverty there a cruel caricature of the Bush direction for the grand old homeland?

I simply don't understand which film has made it so big in this country. I think I can't actually touch what everyone else is watching. Is this feelgoodism? Are we so jaded with our own love stories? Surely we have hung back from this extreme such that it had to be made in the land of the outsourced call centers? Did we even outsource our earnest dreams because to be quite this parodic is, like picking crops, beneath us? Or is this film the very opposite to Foster Wallace earnesty, and is it meant to be viewed ironically? Perhaps I'm simply the only one to view it?

Is it brilliant or incredibly crass, or like what happened with Love Story way back when, does someone need to be politely excused from Yale before he embarrasses us all? I genuinely don't know how to watch this film. My daughter loved it, and as I shall when my ticker quits, I remained mum, not wanting to upset anyone. Because I'm probably just out of touch. I wasn't around when this particular style calmed down. Imagine waking up to platform shoes without what led up to them. Or is it just now OK, in political incorrect fashion, to condescend. Or do I have that completely backwards?

Needless to say, though there is much power in the projected "reality" depicted, the plot is pure bombast, no? (OK, so I looked the word up.  I mean I wiki'd it, and find that the fabric referred to -fustian - covers - I mean the irony will never end - jeans.  I guess as in blue jeans. So bombast has to cover aspirations to worker casual turned hot advert for enough money for a trainer? This is way way too cool!). So, is it fustian prose I aspire to? Do people write that shit? I mean using 'fustian', say, under control rather than as a reach for prosodic power just beyond control? I'll bet David Foster Wallace could have. Virtuousity in anything is as close to witness of miracle as I ever need to come. 

I aim for clarity, believe it or not. Virtuousity never was my forte. (that's a funny line right there)

So, the formula is simple enough. You have to come by this love thing honestly, and then you have to value it more than the most extreme kind of life affirmation apart from it, and then if you put them together you just simply pop. Or something. The ever after Jesus thing.

So why, in this land of no parody - I'm talking here about the people that are able, and I'm not one of them, to distinguish Saturday Night Live from televangelism in structural form - . . . I think I've already written, ad nauseum, about my great confusion, when coming off one hermetic episode or another in my extreme youth, upon coming across What Was on Television at the time.  I truly mistook the televangelism for parody, and was bizarrely shocked that Saturday Night Live could do that on TV.  We're talking way back around the time of Archie Bunker, though I could be off by a few decades. I have yet to recover.  Rip Van Winkle shocked is what I'm talking about here.

But hasn't this just simply got to be the end of something? Aren't we finished with the projection of life, and isn't it time for the living? 

I, of course, have moved beyond hope for that one true love, and displace all socializing onto this blog, since what once passed for feelings has become so impacted that it would take the proverbial icepick to move my innards (hence these gaseous emissions).

But there's nobody out there.  Not a single soul that I can touch where it counts. And I don't think that I'm receding within. I'm really really trying to find a way to say this thing, though it may already be past time. I'm not looking for friends here. I have plenty, though I mostly hide from them. (I don't want to be a burden?)

So my silly life's plot is at least as outrageous as any other plot acceptable for projection. I'm holding out. I'm looking for true contact. I need a reader. Just one would do. I'm not trying to be coy. 

Officially speaking, I liked Revolutionary Road much better. But they are at the same historic moment, about the same historic thing. This tragicomic finding of the thing itself when you let go of it. This giving up on the prospect ever to be other than in the audience for life. I stagger out after some kind of Michelangelo Antonioni festival, maybe it was called the Little Carnegie at the time, way back in the 70's, before I ever even sat through Pink Flamingos. Divine. Eat shit. I stagger out (those Antonioni movies were really slow moving) and figure it can't go any further than this. I stagger out, and now just like on the boat way back when, except that I'm burning lots more fossil fuel about it, I just can't get warm. The furnace won't keep up with the huge differential, uninsulated, between inside and out.

This vision of Mumbai's slums a vision of humanity's failure. Of humanity as karmic stiving so that maybe someday someone's child will be delivered into Nirvana.  The same story of technological climbing out of the shit which just might find us loving our brothers and sisters. Some day soon, John Boy.

I don't understand why there needs to be so much evangelization of fear. Why we hope that our secret service secretly breaks the law to protect us from unenlightened zealots. Why we have so little faith in the humanity we already know and understand. 

Humanity is the coming together of man with man for something other than terror, right? Humanity is reaching out from the winner's circle. Humanity is so not about winners and losers. And sadly, purity of soul and spirit will not grant eternal life of the sort left behind when we leave the theater. But that's what people think Jesus was talking about. 

Not!

We are furless, and hearth will warm only when cooperatively clothed and sheltered. We are naked, and our teeth (happily, my broken one which cuts my tongue will be crowned Monday, insurance or no!) don't do so well against living flesh. We were apparently made to be human, no? (another one right there - I watched the redneck comedy thing once)

My own little hydroponic heating system, washing my cells in rusted sea water not so different from the sulferous metalic tasting stuff I now can handpump so gridfree from my well, still pumps out heat to my extremities. And my lonely mind does reach out across skinned and skinless boundaries. A little bit educated. (A little bit redundant.) A little bit capable with the indrawn syllables of conspiring humanity. And very much certain that eternal life is that which transcends the innering of thought and feeling made possible only by definition of my personal limits of life span and skin which defines me as only me. Eternal life is just the love which powers this self thing beyond itself. I think there is nothing so trivial.

But the moment is now. Eternally.

Oh dear, this is not profound at all.